Mick along today with a load of rocks for flower bed borders, but he didn't get round to do
much with them. Instead he spent most of the day planting shrubs, not much helped by the
bone-dry soil. We helped by heading off
to Corindhap and coming back with
another 20 Hebe “blue gem” to plant
around the perimeter of the garden. We also got a free mumble, some kind of
variegated New Zealand plant:

On with my attempts to mount remote CIFS
file systems on damnation, my Microsoft “Windows” 10 VM, today. I hardly made any headway. What I did learn:

It's not a file system, it's a “share”. Yes, I knew that, I just think it another silly
term.

You can start a shell by hitting Window key-R and entering CMD,
the new name of COMMAND.COMCOMMAND.EXE. Well, Window
key-R is the new, simpler way to call up the run window—if you don't have any
other programs with names starting with R. Otherwise there's another level of
indirection. But then, who could bear more than a few programs on a Microsoft box? And
in my case it's particularly convenient, because my Sun Type 7 keyboard doesn't have
a Window key. Still, it's available with more pain from the start menu.

“It works for me”, from Andy Farkas.

Also from Andy, it seems that you can go into the “File explorer” and type in a CIFS
path name, and it will (maybe) connect it for you. When I tried, it didn't ask for any
credentials, and it didn't ask me to choose a drive letter.

Despite all attempts, I couldn't find out which protocols were missing. Comparing the
messages with last
time, there's even less information. Last time it at least told me “Windows
sockets registry entries required for network connectivity is missing” (original
grammar). This time there's nothing.

Following Microsoft's help pages is a waste of time. They really tell me to ask my friends!
But though my friends know more about “Windows” than most, they weren't able to help. How
about Google? One of the things I found on the way was this
page, which suggests that it's related to VirtualBox, and offers suggestions that don't apply. But knowing that it's related
to VirtuaBox is an advance in itself. Maybe there's something in the copious VirtualBox
documentation. For today, that was enough pain.

Woke up at blank this morning. No power. Another bloody
power failure? No, another bloody Jim Lannen
event: RCD tripped, UPS
drained. And that in the middle of my monthly complete backup, which takes 10 hours! I
also lost the last half of a TV recording. What a pain it is to keep power up in this
household!

That gave me a chance to repeat the backup, of course. Just backing up my own home
directory showed me how much CPU goes into compression:

That wasn't the end of the backup. This one took about 40 hours of CPU time. Using my
favourite comparison of the CDC 7600,
with the rationale I discussed a
couple of months ago, this appears to be equivalent to over a year of CPU time. And
reconsidering, is eureka really only 60 times as fast as a 7600?

Yvonne off with Chris Bahlo
to Ballarat today for a Rural Lifestyle Expo, and somehow I didn't
get much done at home. Had intended to go to Ballarat myself to get some stuff for the
garden, but there was bread to bake, so postponed.

One of the results of the Expo, and also tomorrow's “Extreme Cowboy” activities
in Rokewood, Victoria (which
always suggests “redneck” to me), was that Margaret Swan was here again. Another fun
dinner.

Jamie Fraser asked today about what it would take to fix
the RCD issues. He
seemed to think that we'd have to open up the walls. Clearly a couple of photos will help
explain the situation. The switchboard is in the garage (thank God for that, too, given the
number of times I've had to get to it in the middle of the night!):

From left to right we have the main switch (with the red toggle), an RCD with a blue toggle
that I hadn't noticed before, then the four power switches for the UPS outputs, then the
main RCD. This is the one that continually trips.

Without taking all the wiring apart, it's not clear exactly how the thing is wired, but
clearly the left-hand RCD is connected to the UPS output, and feeds the circuit breakers to
the right. The input comes in from above somewhere, at any rate not from the main switch.
So my current guess is that the main RCD serves everything except the oven and the air
conditioner, but including the UPS. And clearly it's overloaded; the slightest power
fluctuation seems to be able to trip it. The whole system isn't as supple as the sign
claims.

Today was one of those days where I had to heat in the morning. We had an overnight low of
6.5°, which, in this wonderfully well insulated house, meant an inside temperature of 17.5°
inside when I got up. We aim for temperatures between 21° and 24.5° or so, and during the
day it went beyond that. Time for cooling, in different zones from where we had been
heating.

But the air conditioner didn't start. When I turned off the kitchen zone, I got a display
E5. Error message? While I was looking at it, the whole control system powered down.
Tried again, a couple of times. At one point I then got a display E29 on the main display
(to the right of the kitchen control panel, as shown below). Again powered down.

My first guess was that the control system had got itself confused. There have been enough
bugs, including the one above, which shows conflicting information between the two panels. The kitchen panel on the
left claims to be powered on, while the main panel claims that all are powered off.

So: Microsoft solution? Reboot, replace, reinstall? I could only do the first, so powered
down the system at the switchboard, hearing the telltale psssssh from the compressor
in the process. Powering on again gave a click from the outside unit, presumably a relay.

Inside again, turned on. Nothing, but at least it didn't power down any more. Then I
remembered that, for some reason, the system always waits about a minute before doing
anything. And sure enough, after a minute it started and worked, though it restored the
zone status of before I had started changing the settings.

Yvonne's car has a flat tyre. Once that was nothing unusual,
but looking back, it's the first time in this millennium that we have had a flat tyre
without some kind of obvious external influence. The last flat
tyre in a car was 11 years ago as the result of particularly bad roads, not the issue
here.

How do you change a tyre on a Holden
Commodore? Slowly and uncomfortably. Just finding the jack position was complicated,
and the first time I got it wrong. And the jack was particularly hard to use. Most of my
flat tyres were on Citroëns, not because
of the make, but because that's what we drove when flat tyres were common. And they had the
wonderful feature of a built-in jack. How I wished I had had that today.

The tyre isn't worth repairing; there's almost no tread left. Time to replace both rear
tyres.

Another power failure at
10:22 this morning. Another power
failure at 11:56 this morning. Another power failure at 12:06 this afternoon.
Another power failure at
12:27 this afternoon. Fortunately they were all short, but it looked like things could get
worse. After the third one, called up Powercor, spoke with Michelle and was told that power would be restored at 13:30.
Why do I get the impression that people aren't listening? In any case, it seemed that
there was a widespread outage due to some issue
in Buninyong, and 2,834 premises were
affected, so under the circumstances I suppose we were lucky.

But what about the compensation for power outages? She told me that I would get paid $120
for 20 hours or more unscheduled outages in a calendar year, and that they'd do it
automatically. Two problems: why only unscheduled outages? If scheduled outages were
included, I suspect we'd have far fewer of the long outages we have been seeing lately, like
the nearly 6 hours last
month.

But the other thing is that we did have over 20 hours of unscheduled outages last
year, and there was no automatic compensation. Omitting momentary and scheduled outages and
outages where I'm not sure of the time, we have:

Last week I compared the
kitchen appliances at Chris Bahlo's house and here. The results were surprising: her
el-cheapo installation was much better than ours, for which we paid nearly $1000 extra over
and above the standard installation. What does JG King's standard installation look like? Into
town for shopping, and on the way dropped in on their display home in Lucas to compare. How about that, pretty
similar to Chris', and very different from what they installed here. From left to right
ours, JG King's and Chris':

In particular, all the issues that we have with our current stove don't apply to the
standard issue: the depth of the cooking area is 50.5 cm, compared to Chris' 53 cm and our
40 cm, the wok burner is in the middle, the hot burner is in the front, and there's ample
distance (20 cm) from the back burners to the back of the stove.

I had intended to test the hood as well, but I couldn't get my anemometer to work. I had
had trouble with it when I got
it, but this time nothing I tried worked. All I could do was to confirm that I could
feel air flow from the side panels of the hood, something I can't do with our own. And in
general the hood looks better:

So JG King do supply reasonable kitchen appliances, even as standard. Why do I get
such inferior quality after paying a premium of nearly $1,000? My guess is that the people
who do the specials aren't as careful as the people who do the standard fare.

Called up Karl Waldron today, who told me that errors E5 and E29 are related to power
issues. As if to prove his point, after one of the power failures I got an error 5
display. Told him about the other
issues with the controller, though I'm not sure I got my point across. But he
suggested I perform a “self learn mode” activation, and sent me instructions:

After pressing “FAN CONTROL”, the zone controller displays the characters “Fan” in 7 segment
representation, and the main controller shows “LOW MED HIGH”, with HIGH blinking.
When it finishes, it displays E5 as advertised, but now LOW blinks. After a while the fan
goes off and it displays E3, then powers off completely. On (manual) power-on, most
settings are preserved, but in my case all zones were turned on except for zone 5. I can't
see an explanation for that.

Will this fix my problems? I don't think so. But, as Karl said, it can't do any harm.

One of the things that irritated me changing the tyre today was that the hose tyre inflator
is so old and worn out. It no longer sealed properly, and holding it in place was a pain.
Time for a new one:

Bunnings didn't have the hose alone, just
entire inflators. Still, they're not very expensive, and the inflator also has a tendency
to jam. So: digital ($40) or analogue ($18)? In the end I decided on the digital thing
because the analogue one had scales in all sorts of obsolete units, making it unnecessarily
difficult to read.

Back home, took a look. They thoughtfully supplied batteries, and the instructions were
obvious:

One each way round! And how many people (especially people likely to purchase this device)
know which side of the battery is positive and which is negative?

Of course putting them both in the same way round isn't going to damage the electronics, and
it worked. But then there was step 2: “Purchase a 1/4" bsp male air fitting”. Why?
These things all have the same fittings:

I'm still waiting for the price of Lithium batteries for solar energy to come down, and
today I heard of a new
technology: Zinc–bromine
batteries, which this article calls Zinc bromide batteries. It talks of an Australian company called
Redflow which is marketing them for domestic solar energy storage. But the
thing that caught my eye was the name of the
CEO: Simon Hackett, along with a
photo showing that we're not the only people getting older. I can't have seen him for over
10 years. And of course things aren't as rosy as they seem, as the article above says:

Even so, at an estimated installed price, including an inverter, of $17,500 to $19,500
including GST, the return on investment for ZCell, as for other batteries, was "pretty
marginal", said Mr Hackett

Mick along again today for another 6 hours of garden work. No wonder I can't be bothered to
do it myself: it's a lot more work than I ever imagined. Now we have all the plants
planted, and the irrigation lines are in place, but we still don't have the drippers. I
suppose I'm going to have to do that myself.

Call at 15:28 from Dana of Powercor, phone
number 03 9683 4215, to tell me yes, I am eligible for a refund, and it happened two months
ago to my electricity retailer, mumble Energy. $100.

Huh? I'm not with mumble Energy, the sum is $120, and there were two premises
involved. Dana claimed that mumble Energy is the old name of my energy
retailer, Red Energy—the computer
hadn't been updated yet. She wanted to know what made me think I would get $120. Simple:
that's what Michelle told me. Clearly she didn't know what was going on, and wanted to
check. I suggested that she check the rest more carefully to be sure that I didn't find any
further holes in her actions. Ah, I should forgive human error.

Time to do some checking. Sadly, she's right with the $100, as this page shows. But mumble Energy? Red Energy has been in existence only
since 2004, and they've been called Red Energy at least since 2007, when I signed up with
them. I can't find anything on line that suggests they ever had a different name. And even
if they did, isn't 8 years enough time to update a database of your energy suppliers?

More investigation of antenna connector types. It seems that the connector to the tuner is
a male MCX connector, and the other
end is a male F connector. Another
order on eBay, another 3 weeks to wait. And
though these adapters are cheap (this one cost US $3.50 including postage), they cost nearly
half the price of the tuner.

Into town today to have the tyres changed on Yvonne's Commodore. $89 per tyre,
including balancing. But if I
want nitrogen in the tyres, it'll cost
another $5. Why? And why nitrogen? They tell me it leaks less—not a particular issue with
modern tyres, as I have observed—and that the ride is smoother. Clearly I'm going to have to investigate,
but where do you get nitrogen to top up the tyres?

While in town, Yvonne wanted to buy some new plants. Not the
time of year, I said. But she still wanted them, so we looked around at Formosa. We
brought some Alstroemerias from
Kleins Road, but they all died. They grow like fury, but the one she found was quite a
small pot for $16. Why so expensive? We left that.

Then there was lavender, against which we also decided for some reason. And tree guards
were surprisingly expensive. So bought only
a Mandevilla laxa and off to
Masters to see what they had there. Almost
nothing, just slightly cheaper bamboo stakes. Back to Formosa and finally bought the
plastic for the tree guards. All in all, pretty much a waste of time.

Rainer Hurling has trouble with Vigra since I tried to update it to the latest version (1.11.0). Time to try for myself. But now
I have VMs, it's time to migrate stable to a VM. That's simple enough: follow the
HOWTO. And then build a new world, now
that FreeBSD 10.3 has been released.

The buildworld failed with missing definitions. I've seen that before: corrupted
working copy of the Subversion repository. Another checkout? Simple. And yes, exactly the same kind of corruption that I
had seen before, including files that had been updated before the branch point
for stable/10:

How can that happen? Last time I sent a message to the FreeBSD internal mailing list, but
got no useful replies. Somehow this stuff is far too flaky.

I've also been having problems building ports. I build from a working copy there too, and
only a week ago I established that I had had corruption there, and checked out a new working
copy. And it's already broken! At least this time the dates aren't as
implausible:

A couple of days ago I received mail from Carlos “Cartola” Carvalho telling me that the
Hugin package was missing
dependencies. Of course I had checked that long ago (partially after tripping over my own
missing dependencies). But I had built from source, and Cartola had installed the binary
package. So I tried it, and how about that, he's right: it didn't install the dependencies.
I had discussed the matter with Edwin Groothuis, who told me of a make target I
hadn't heard of:

So is this the wrong package? Went looking and found it at http://pkg.freebsd.org/freebsd:10:x86:64/latest/All/hugin-2016.0.0_1.txz. Dated
only a few hours ago. Downloaded it and took a look. There's a file +MANIFEST in
there in a format that is clearly not intended for humans, and which I don't understand, but
after changing commas to \n I found things like:

These are clearly the dependencies, and all three of them didn't get installed. Why? This
is beginning to look like a bug in pkg. Sent off another message to the ports list,
and again didn't get any more insight, though Don Lewis pointed me to another make
target that I didn't know, check-plist, which found “issues”:

“Pear” is the translation of German „Birne“, which means either pear (obviously) or light
globe. But this has come back to bite us. Today one of them died. At a guess it ran for
less than 2 hours a day for about 300 days. That's considerably less than the reliability
of obsolete tungsten globes. When I changed it, it was very hot, almost too hot to touch.
Is this what I get for buying cheap globes?

My mail to the ports mailing list about the Hugin port bore some fruit. Don Lewis discovered, with the help of Yet
Another Makefile target (check-plist) that the pkg-plist file
contained errors. How could that be? I used some other recommended method to build it.
But he had also verified that, at least for him, that after rectifying this problem and
building a new package, it installed all the dependencies. So at least pkg was not
behaving correctly. First let's see if the package does now work.

Call from Dana at Powercor today,
confirming what she said on
Tuesday: the refund of $100 had been sent to my energy retailer for Stones Road, and
she would send me a cheque for Kleins Road. And it could take 2 weeks. But then,
everything seems to be slow at Powercor.

Nikolai was born an almost perfect example of
the Borzoi breed. Ron Frolley was really
unhappy about his one (but serious) defect: he was
a cryptorchid. But recently I heard
somebody claim that undescended testicles could cause cancer (can't everything?). It was my
understanding that Ron had spent a lot of money on Niko, and that he had probably had the
testicles removed.

Still, worth checking. Yvonne asked Sally Stasitis if he had
been castrated, but she didn't know. She suggested that we
call the vet, Maroondah Veterinary Clinic in Croydon, Victoria, phone
+61-3-9870-0303. Called them up. No, they had only seen him once and referred him to the
Monash Veterinary Clinic, phone
+61-3-9544-7455. Called them up and discovered that they have nothing to do
with Monash University except
the location. But they were able to confirm yes, he had had the testicles removed. All
went surprisingly smoothly.

Two weeks ago Melinda Radus
offered us a cat that Yvonne wanted to have, and Kelly Daly
offered to bring it with her
from Adelaide. But in the meantime
Melinda found another cat which Yvonne also liked. The original one, Kito, is 3½ years old,
while the new one is 16 weeks old. Chris Bahlo was also in the market, so in the end we
arranged to buy both and fight over who gets which.

We received copious paperwork in the meantime, including Melinda's guess at which cat we
would take: she called the new one Adelhills Rhani MS Lehey.

We had planned to meet Kelly for dinner at Gary and Chris Daly's
in Delacombe this evening, but things
didn't quite work out like that: Kelly had an eye problem and had to have it looked at at
an opthalmologist. The problem
proved to be a false alarm, but it meant that they didn't leave until about 17:30, and (as
we later discovered) they arrived
in Ballarat round 23:30, by which time
we had gone home again. We arranged to pick up the cats tomorrow morning.

In the meantime, we had dinner with Chris and Gary. It seemed it didn't come for free.
Yvonne had to make some Aïoli for Chris:

For the rest of the day we let her walk around. As always, she hid in all sorts of
unexpected places, and by evening she still hadn't really come round. But Melinda told us
that she was shy; we're used to that

That photo illustrates at least two things that he was talking about: backlighting and using
a sheet of paper to lighten the shadows.

And the third? Always use a lens hood. And indeed, everybody except myself
had a lens hood on their camera, in some cases reversed. I beg to differ, especially with
zoom lenses, where the hood has to be designed to not cut off the edges when the lens is set
to its minimal focal length. At the maximum length, it's not much help, as these three
photos against the sun show. At least one was taken with no protection, and one with my
hand shading just outside the field of view:

While I was at the photo meeting, Doug Braddy from the Dereel Men's
Shed came over and asked me to come and visit him afterwards. It's the first time
I've been in the new shed, but for some reason I didn't take any photos.

What he wanted was: the shed had received a donation of a ThinkCentre with a 2.13 GHz Core 2
6400 (Passmark 1299), 2 GB
memory and Microsoft “Windows” XP. No keyboard, no
mouse. And he wanted a more modern “Windows” on it. OK, modulo license key I can do that,
though when I took it with me, it wasn't clear what the configuration was, nor whether it
could handle “Windows” 7 in a timely manner. We'll find that out tomorrow.

Lying awake at 3:34 this morning, I head a faint beep. I've heard too many of them.
Out into the garage. Yes,
the RCD had tripped
again. I had intended to put together a catalogue of everything Jim Lannen did wrong and
present it to him, but I think I'm going to have to get him to come here to fix this
particular problem really soon.

Spent some time looking at Doug Braddy's computer today. To my surprise, found an original
Microsoft disk for “Windows” 7 “Home Premium” (is
that a prize or a price?), so installed that.

Why is Microsoft so slow, and why is there so much disk activity at startup? In this case,
it seems that 2 GB memory is pretty minimal for “Windows” 7, and it was swapping its little
heart out. But the most interesting thing was “Internet Explorer”'s reaction to my attempt
to download firefox:

How did that happen? All that was running was the Task Manager and the “Windows” Update. Stopped that and wasn't able to install the
updates: an update was in progress. How do I get past that? Not only did rebooting not
help, it wasn't possible: shutdown hung trying to install those updates that had been
downloaded. And I couldn't power down either, because the power button was set to “Sleep”.
In the end I had to pull the power plug.

Come back up again—same message! It offers help, of course, but I know how much help that
is (“Ask one of your friends” is really one suggestion I have seen). But I followed it and
eventually came to this page, which really was helpful. In a nutshell:

Start an “Administrator Command Prompt”. I have no idea how to do that other than the
way they suggest. If I simply click on the COMMAND.EXE prompt, I get a
non-Administrator shell with Not Enough Magic.

Stop and restart wuauserv:

net stop wuauserv
net start wuauserv

That sounds almost sane. And it did the job. Gradually I'm learning a few tricks. I
wish I didn't have to.

After that and the inevitable iterative approach to installing updates, everything went
well. Enough community spirit for one month.

So now the FreeBSD ports system has had time
to build a new Hugin package, so
tried reinstalling it. Sure enough, the package at http://pkg.freebsd.org/freebsd:10:x86:64/latest/All/ is now portrevision 2. And
it still doesn't install the dependencies. It looks like this still could be my
problem, but clear error checking from pkg would help immensely.

Taking photos of computer displays isn't easy. Both the display and the camera sensor
consist of discrete elements, and the potential
for Moiré is enormous. But today I had a
case that beat anything I have ever seen:

More nice Hibiscus
rosa-sinensis flowers are blooming. I should be working on calculating the focus steps,
but working my way through Perl code makes
my head hurt, so today I tried guesswork. The following photos were taken with different
apertures and different focus steps:

Gradually Rani is coming out of her
shell, but it's a slow process. As Melinda advertised, she's somewhat timid, and it took
her a while to get used to us at all. She spent much of the day in Yvonne's office, closely watched by the dogs:

Got up a couple of times in the night looking for Rani, somewhat concerned that she might have
suffocated in her hiding place, but it wasn't until morning that Yvonne found her. Clearly a particularly timid little kitten. Spent some time
discussing whether we should borrow Kito from Chris Bahlo, but in the end decided that it
would be better not to.

In the course of the day she came around. One of the issues was that the dogs are so
fascinated by her:

Somehow I can't handle video well. The poached egg video was pretty bare-bones, but I had
really wanted to join two together. A couple of years ago I thought I had
found a way to do that, but for some reason it didn't work today. Oh, to find some good
free video editing software, not to mention the motivation to improve my recordings.
Somehow it's a completely different field from still photography.

As a short workaround to windows 7 hibernating when you least want it to:
If you press Win/Meta + X , the "mobility center" should pop up. From
memory, the rightmost item on the lower row is "presentation mode". Turn
that on, and it won't even suspend the monitor until you disable it again.
I think it's meant for really long presentations, but as long as it works
etc.

In fact I had simply turned off hibernation in the Control Panel, but it's good to remember
tricks like this one.

I've complained in the past about problems
using HTML5 to display videos, and I've
found ways to revert to flash. But I forgot to document them! My latest install
on eureka uses HTML5 because it has the power to do so.

But there are still downsides in using HTML5, notably the lack of nagivability. How do I
get back to flash again? Once, it seems, it was enough to go
to about:config and set media.webm.enabled
to false, as this
(unnecessary) video shows. The instructions are in the comments.

Unfortunately, that no longer works. The real solution appears to be this firefox addon. With that, it's several times faster (and only about 10
times slower than mplayer) and I get
my navagibility back.

In sequence, the photos were taken without a lens hood, with a lens hood, and with my hand
shading the lens. It's clear that the lens hood makes a minor difference, but in general
it's not worth the trouble, especially when you consider the size:

A few weeks back she brought me back a newer can opener, which I first tried to use today.
And I couldn't! My first thought was that it was left-handed, but whichever way you look at
it, it won't fit. There's a big lip in the way:

And that's all. It doesn't make any sense at all! Time to call up support. There's a
number on the package: DKSH Australia, 02 8884 6000. Called that and discovered the number
has changed: it's now 02 9425 5000. But they're just a distributor, and they don't have a
support department. Their recommendation: take it back to the retailer. They weren't
interested in feedback - they get that from their retailers.

OK, if all else fails, including the manual and customer service, what's the other
possibility? YouTube, of course:

And there it is! The thing doesn't cut into the lid, it cuts the whole top of the can off!

Thus the strange position in the illustrations. And in fact it works quite well, though
it'll be interesting to see what happens when the can is full to the brim with liquid.
Maybe I would have understood it better if the images had been a little more detailed, or if
there had been any text explaining how it differed from an ordinary can opener.

I wonder how many returns occur as the result of this appalling “documentation”.

Called up Dana at Powercor today to ask
what had happened to my $100 refund. To my surprise, she knew exactly who I was, and said
that she would follow up with Red Energy.
That she did, confirmed that they had received the payment in early March, that it would be
in my next bill, and that they would call me to confirm. Doubtless they'll also be able to
explain why it wasn't refunded in this bill.

More investigation of the Hugin port again today. Checked everything, and all seemed well, but pkg still doesn't
want to install all the dependencies. About the only thing that showed up was the message:

Curiouser and curiouser. The dependency is now there, but where does the message come from?
But now it wants to install all the missing dependencies, with the exception
of autopano-sift-c. And looking at that, where did it get the dependency name in the
first place? It's in the +MANIFEST file, but where did it come from? Spent some
time playing around with the package file in Emacs, in the process discovering (I
think) that you can only use pkg install to install files with a full path name that
ends in .txz. And this difference between autopano-sift-c
and autopano-sift-C came back to bite me.
In /usr/ports/graphics/autopano-sift-c/Makefile I find:

With the Salvias it's a different matter.
Nearly all of them died, I now think because of the heat and the wind. In particular, we no
longer have any Salvia
microphylla. But one has not completely given up, even trying to flower:

Call from Mel at Red Energy today to
talk about my Powercor refund. But
first she needed to ask security questions: what's my date of birth.

This is getting to be just plain silly, for two reasons. Firstly, it's available on the web
(though, surprisingly, not as easily as I thought), so it's not a security question at all;
certainly it's normal that people share that information with their friends (“next week I'll
be 0x40 years old”). And secondly, assuming that it is secure, why should I give it
to somebody who can't authenticate herself?

She didn't understand, of course, even after I explained a scenario where a man in the
middle could get the information and abuse it. “I'd never do anything like that”. This is
to “protect my security”. No, it isn't; it does exactly the opposite. In the end, she
agreed to send me a letter, but it was clear that she thought I was some kind of crank.

This isn't an isolated incident. Most commercial companies, including banks, are similarly
lax with their “security”. Doesn't some industry association have recommendations for this
sort of thing?

I got a matching polo shirt too, but only long enough for Vanda Iwanowski to take a few
photos of us together. We'll get the real goods later. Lots of dogs there, of course, and
Vanda put on a barbecue, so we had time for socializing:

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the
president of Turkey, is not a very nice
man. He's authoritarian, and his country's involvement in
the Syrian Civil War appears to
be mainly a cover for killing Kurds. And
his attitude towards personal and collective freedoms is repressive at best. He doesn't
tolerate the press at the best of times; he has been systematically cracking down on
dissension of normal proportions in his own country. All this has made him very unpopular
in Europe and elsewhere.

On the other hand, the European
Union has been courting him to help solve the refugee crisis that is flooding
south-eastern Europe, despite objections from many quarters.

A week or two ago Jan Böhmermann,
a German “artist” with dubious taste, staged a satire about Erdoğan on
his ZDFprogramme. It wasn't in the
best of taste. In fact, it was in very poor taste, and in general it reminds me of the lack
of feeling demonstrated
by Charlie Hebdo shooting:

But given the situation, it seems almost appropriate to show him that he can't suppress
everything. Erdoğan saw it differently: he filed not one, but two proceedings against
Böhmermann in Germany: one for personal insult, the other for insult of a foreign head of
state, which is regulated by § 103 of
the StGB (Strafgesetzbuch, German
penal code).

Is that valid? § 5 of
the Grundgesetz (“Ground law” or
constitution) guarantees freedom of expression in art and science.

This was art, wasn't it? Good question. It was clearly designed to be insulting. And the
last thing Germany wants is an argument with him.

But what to do? The law is the law, even if people are now wondering whether the paragraph
hasn't passed its use-by date. It seems it was in the original version of the code back in
1871, and at least one German news programme showed that version. But does it cover the
alleged crime? The relevant part of the current text reads:

To save me translating it myself, there's this translation on
the web. For some reason it refers to the paragraphs as sections.

Whosoever insults a foreign head of state, or, with respect to his position, a member of a
foreign government who is in Germany in his official capacity, or a head of a foreign
diplomatic mission who is accredited in the Federal territory shall be liable to
imprisonment not exceeding three years or a fine, in case of a slanderous insult to
imprisonment from three months to five years.

But that's not the way I read it. Preserving some of the original word order, which is
important,

Whoever a foreign head of state or whoever with reference to their position a member of a
foreign government, that is present in the inland (i.e. Germany) in official capacity
... insults

There's a dangling condition there! Does the “present in the inland” refer to both
categories of dignitary,or only the government member? Certainly Erdoğan was not present in
the “inland”. The translation attempts to resolve the problem, but it's not the only way
that it can be read, and it's the original that will be applied.

This ambiguity wasn't present in the version of 1871 (which came into effect on 1 January
1872):

Whoever is guilty of insult towards the king or regent of a country not belonging to the
German Reich will be punished by a prison term of one month to two years, as long as this
country has established by contract or law reciprocity towards the German Reich.

This is actually a lot clearer. Interestingly, the sentences were lighter then, not more
than two years.

So does the current content of § 103 cover the matter? The press seems to think so. But at
least one expert quoted § 104a. This paragraph didn't exist in the 1871 version, but it
contains some of the text that was in the original § 103:

Offences under this chapter [original: section] shall only be prosecuted if the
Federal Republic of Germany maintains diplomatic relations with the other state,
reciprocity is guaranteed and was also guaranteed at the time of the offence, a request to
prosecute by the foreign government exists, and the Federal Government authorises the
prosecution.

That's relatively clear, and it's very important. But so far, nobody has mentioned it in
the news. It's also interesting that the Government has a say in the matter; it erodes the
separation between the executive and the judiciary. It was also not in the original
paragraph § 103. And this puts the government in a particularly difficult position.

The government spent a week deliberating, and
finally Angela Merkel announced
that the government would authorize the prosecution. And people are up in arms! Out with
Merkel!

In fact, I can't see what else she could do. If it wasn't for § 104a (and it appears that
most people, including the press, don't know about it; I only found it while following up a
single reference), it would be clear that the government could have no influence on the
matter. But why should they? They can only have a negative influence: refuse to allow
prosecution. And under what circumstances should they do that? It would have to be a very
important one, and I don't see it here.

Given the nature of the matter, it seems completely clear to me that there's enough basis
for a prosecution. And that's a matter for the judiciary, not the executive. Nothing to do
with the person who was insulted. The real question is whether § 103 StGB overrides § 5 GG.
In particular, was this art or an unveiled attempt to insult a foreign head of state? Even
Böhmermann stated that it was the latter. I hope the legal system will be lenient.

There's a petition on
change.org for freedom
for Jan Böhmermann, and I decided
to sign it. For that, of course, I had to sign up, which also means I get lots of other
petition requests. One of them seems quite
compelling: I'm told that
Gary Brabham, son
of Sir Jack Brabham, was jailed
for raping a 6-year-old girl. And he gets parole after 6 months! How can that be?

How, indeed? Looking at the details, it's not clear what happened at all. How old was the
girl? What did he do to her? Clearly he's been found guilty of something, but it's not
easy to find out what:

This article states that the sentence was 2 years, 3 months, with suspension
after 6 months, and that the girl was 8 years old.

This version seems to concentrate on his father, but states that the girl was 6
years old at the time.

This
version makes her 8 years old again, but lessens the sentence to 18 months.

This version, written before sentencing, notes that the jury found him guilty of
one charge of rape and one of indecent treatment. Five other charges of indecent
treatment were dismissed.

So what's the truth? One thing's clear: the press makes what they want out of it. In fact,
it seems he was accused of repeatedly abusing her between the ages of 6 and 10. But why the
discrepancy in the reported sentences? And what does “rape” mean? It seems it happened in
a moving car.

I'm not trying to make the offence seem less than it is. But with so little understanding
of what really happened, how can I assume that the judge was too lenient in his sentencing?
I certainly couldn't sign the petition. And in general, is imprisonment the appropriate
treatment for somebody with these problems?

Rani has been with us for 8 days now.
The dogs are no longer as excited, though Piccola still doesn't want to know. But Rani has become much less timid, and this
evening we took some photos of her playing with Chris Bahlo, with interested participation
by the dogs:

It's amazing what a difference it makes to have a studio flash in the lounge room. I took a
total of 239 photos, though a large number were useless because I didn't wait for the flash
to recycle, despite the fact that it only takes about 2 seconds.

I've been dragging my feet on calling Jim Lannen about the electrical problems, partially
because it'll take a while to compile a complete list, and partially because I don't want
the confrontation. But it'll have to happen soon. This evening
the RCD tripped yet
again, fortunately at 20:45 while we were watching TV. I suspect it has something to do
with power line fluctuations.

I've seen this before, and
I've tried repeatedly to
find a human on their so-called “technical support” line, all in vain.

The last time was 9 months ago. Time to try again? Called 13 76 63 and was presented with
this emetic voice menu which doesn't offer me the choices I want, and in the end connected
me to the billing department. I could have called “technical support” on 13 39 33, and
maybe I should have, but based on my previous experience with them, they can't help.

Ultimately I was connected to “technical support” anyway, which proved my prior experience.
I told Daisy (is that really his name?) that I wanted them to stop refusing my email, and he
asked if I wanted to delete my account. He asked me if I was using a corporate email.
What's that? He asked all sorts of questions that suggested that the person who wrote the
scripts didn't understand the issues either, including which mail client (I suppose he
means MUA) I was using, and
which ISP I was using. The only thing he didn't ask was what the error message was.

Asked to speak to his supervisor. No point: he would just say the same thing. On my
insistence he connected me to mumble, who called himself Edward on the second
attempt. He didn't claim to be a supervisor; he was a technical specialist,
who told me that the ISP protocol was incorrect. He, too, wasn't interested in the error
code: I should speak to my ISP. It seems that all such problems are automatically blamed on
the other end.

I asked to speak to his supervisor. They're all on training, he said. This seems to be the
standard answer from BigPond; I can't recall ever being connected to a genuine supervisor.
I asked him to file a complaint. He told me I would get a call back in 15 to 30 minutes,
and only on pressure gave me a dubious complaint reference: 0bff026b b817f0ae. Of course,
there was no call back. Time to give up? Probably. 25 minutes, and the only result was a
significant increase in my blood pressure.

Discussed the matter on IRC. People came up with a number of suggestions. This page (crowd support, which seems to an attempt to compensate for BigPond's
non-existent technical support). It came up with the the interesting statement:

The error message IB703 means that the domain is listed in the Spamhaus DBL which is why
it is being rejected. This needs to be taken up with Spamhaus.

It went on like that for a while, at a snail's pace. Yvonne called me for breakfast, and when I got back the connection timed out. And the promised
transcript (by email!) never arrived. Tried again and was connected with Christian Jev, who
at least tried.

Christian Jev Do you mean that you cant send emails to bigpond.com emails?

Greg Read the article.

Christian Jev Im so sorry but i wont be able to access external links Greg.

Amazing! They're an Internet service provider with support people who don't have access to
the web. Probably they don't want them surfing when they should be working. And the first
person hadn't even mentioned the fact. Christian claimed that it was for the security of
the customer's accounts. More bloody nonsense! So I pasted the article.

He asked a few questions, including some that made sense. Once again he asked who my ISP
was. What does he mean by ISP? The people who supply my connection to the Internet? What
difference does that make? In any case, www.lemis.com is a hosted system (RootBSD, whom I can recommend), not related to an ISP.

Christian Jev To be able to send emails without erros Greg, the outgoing server
should come from the ISP

Greg No, that is completely wrong. To send emails without errors, the MTA should
conform to the Internet standards. And it does. Your MTA produced an error
message. What does it mean? Until that is clarified, all evidence points to an error at
your end.

And again questions about my MUA, where it should be abundantly clear that my MUA has
nothing to do with it. I sent him the headers of the rejected mail, which showed nothing of
interest, but it was apparently enough to blow his mind.

Christian Jev Okay i have asked my supervisor about this one for you Greg What
she told me is that for security purposes, our system blocks some emails by defualt and
what you need to do is to contact your domain or ISP.

I finally decided to say that I am my ISP, which might be correct for their
interpretation of the term. So he asked for a traceroute to mail.telstra.com, which
was interesting. Firstly, a traceroute means nothing in this context. We know there was
connectivity. Secondly, mail.telstra.com has nothing to do with BigPond mail.
Thirdly, it has nothing to do with mail at all! nmap shows:

They only have one MX, and it's extmail.bigpond.com. All three servers are
too polite to respond to traceroute.

After that, he acknowledged that he couldn't help. He couldn't escalate either: for that I
would need a BigPond account. So I asked him whether I should just take it to the
TIO, and after 19 pages of discussion he didn't
find any alternative.

I feel a bit sorry for Christian. He really did try, but he was limited by his experience
and the lack of support within his company. I suspect he is new with the company, and it's
very likely he won't last long—does anybody? So now to the TIO, assuming they're even in a
position to handle the complaint. But it really beggars belief that nobody in “technical
support” understands what the error messages are trying to say. If it's “you're in a spam
list”, it's broken. I suspect that that's only one of the reasons, but that the spam filter
is so baroque that nobody wants to look at it.

The encounter with BigPond technical support
has something Daliesque about it.
But during the over four hours I tried to resolve the problem, I have come up with some
hypotheses about what their terminology really means:

Corporate email: one that doesn't have a well-known commercial domain name such
as @yahoo.com or @gmail.com. Thus @lemis.com
and @freebsd.org would be corporate emails.

Tomorrow is my Colonoscopy. For that
kind of examination, you need a really clean gut, as I discovered nearly 50 years ago. On that occasion it was
an enema, but nowadays they use chemicals.
From 8:30 this morning I was on a solids-free diet (almost). The only things that I can
take are water, coffee (strangely), clear soups
and Sports drinks, whatever they are.
How am I going to survive?

While pondering this, got a call from Roslyn (I think) of the Ballarat Base Hospital this
morning, confirming that
my colonoscopy will occur as
scheduled tomorrow, and going over—again—all the details I had supplied. I was supposed to
ask her about questions I had, but she wasn't much help. I am to go to the Day Procedure
Centre, which I knew, but she couldn't tell me how to get there. She couldn't tell me about
how long it would take before laxatives worked. She couldn't tell me how to deal with the
hunger.

How? Magnesium oxide is completely insoluble in water. And it was particularly difficult
to keep in suspension, so in the end I really couldn't swallow all it. But what
pharmaceutical company can't distinguish between solution and suspension? You'd fail a Year
8 chemistry test with that kind of inaccuracy. The effect set in after about an hour.

The next, at 17:00, was Glycoprep, of
which I needed to drink a whole litre. The instructions state to drink 4 glasses of 250 ml
each at 15 minute intervals, in other words an hour in total. Clearly somebody should hit
the documentation writer over the head with the spare fence post.

The documentation didn't meantion any reaction to PicoPrep, but stated that the effects of
GlycoPrep would set in in 1 to 3 hours, presumably from the beginning of ingestion. I
managed about 25 minutes. By the end of the evening I must have had the cleanest gut
in Dereel. It could have been used for
sausage casings with no further cleaning.

The funny thing was that I didn't feel hungry. But somehow the day was wasted.

Letter from Melanie from Red Energy
this morning, explaining the reasons (Privacy Act 1988, which I suppose I should read), and offering the alternative of a
password. Well, yes, a password is more secure, but only if the person asking can
authenticate himself. How do get the issues across to people? They're so obvious to
me, but it seems that nobody in the Real World thinks about the issues.

The good result of the matter, apart from the fact that the $100 in question was applied to
this quarter's bill, is that they have offered me a 10% pay-on-time discount on my bill.
Previously it was only 5%. Since I always pay on time, this is a real advantage. But I
have to agree to it! Think of all the trouble they would get into if they applied
the discount without my permission!

Today was the day of my Colonoscopy.
Spent a restless night, not helped by leg pain (which I suspect was due to lack of
electrolytes) and the high outside temperature. By the time I got up at 5:00, the outside
temperature was still 20°. And the weather forecast predicted a maximum temperature of 19°!

What idiot decided that I should take a laxative before heading off on a 30 minute car
journey? That's why I had to get up at 5:00, so that by the time I left at 6:30 I should
have had a bowel motion. I didn't.

Got to the hospital at 7:00 with no mishaps. While looking for the Day Procedure Unit, an
old woman with a backpack and walking stick came up behind me and said “Another poor sod for
the Day Procedure Unit”. I suppose my backpack gave me away. At least she pointed me in
the right direction.

Checkin was as you'd expect: wait in line for about 5 minutes, then confirm all the
information that I had confirmed on the phone yesterday. Then a relatively short wait,
after which a nurse, Jena, called me in for investigation of blood sugar and pressure (6.4
mmol/l, 137/90). She thought 6.4 normal for the time, due to hormonal activity after waking
up. I think she's right, but she's the first medical practitioner to tell me so. She asked
me all the questions again, and took me to a nearly-curtained-off too-short bed to change
into one of these strange gowns they so love in hospitals, and to wait for the next step.

That happened about 20 minutes later when Cheree came in and asked all the questions again, then
attached a blood pressure cuff and a cable with a couple of contacts to my chest. She also
told me I had the gown on the wrong way round, so I had to remove the cuff to change it.

A little later Adele, an anaesthetist, came in and asked me a subset of my details,
including when I last ate and drank and the all-important date of birth, then told me what
was going to happen. As I
suspected, sedation meant not a complete
anaesthetic, and it's normal for people to be conscious but groggy (sounds like me) during
the operation.

While I was waiting, Cheree and Adele went to the beds on either side of me. An 84-year-old
woman who didn't seem to understand the questions about when she had last eaten. On the
other side was a 73-year-old man who could barely speak (“You know why you're here?”
“They're going to put a camera down my throat”). After hearing those two, I felt relatively
unimportant.

Finally, the doctor (AL-ANSARI, DR MOHAMM, according to the labels they put all over me),
presumably Mohammed, came in. I'm used to Muslim doctors—my
own GP, Majid, is one, and
so is Ahmad, who referred me here. But this one was big, burly and red-headed, clearly a
convert. He had relatively little to say—after all, all questions had been asked—but
required a signature.

Then I got wheeled out into a waiting room, where the chief anaesthetist told me how to lie,
pretty much like the Wikipedia image:

Next I was still awake, but being moved again to the waiting room. The time was 9:45, 20
minutes later. All over. Somehow the anaesthetics had had an on/off effect. I've never
experienced anything like it. I wasn't in the slightest tired, though I had had to promise
not to drive, cook or operate electrical equipment for 24 hours. They had located a 7 mm
polyp of undescribed
type which will be investigated, and I'll hear more from Majid in two weeks. They want me
back in 5 years, which suggests that they don't have any great concerns about my condition.
Reading the Wikipedia page suggests the same: polyps under 1 cm in diameter are almost never
cancerous.

Ate a couple of bearable sandwiches, and Yvonne came to pick
me up. All over. The preparations were the biggest problem.

While lying awake in bed last night, I thought over some of the links to the BigPond mail issue. This one contains the information:

A client suddenly can no longer send emails to any Bigpond addresses (anyone else is fine
- have checked that they are not blacklisted anywhere). After investigation, we found that
if we removed their web site url from their signature, it will send to Bigpond just fine.

So BigPond is deliberately blocking texts if “suspect” (for them) URLs are present in the
mail. But it gets worse: this page states:

Emails sent to or from BigPond accounts, may be blocked if they contain links to
blacklisted domains, or are using certain URL shorteners. The affected emails will be
rejected and receive a bounceback message advising of this.

The first time I read this, I assumed that they followed the links, but that's not what they
said. My .sig file reads:

Sent from my desktop computer.
Finger groggyhimself@FreeBSD.org for PGP public key.
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program
reports problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua

Could it be that BigPond was rejecting tinyurl.com? That's easy enough to check. And yes, that's it! I can now
send mail to BigPond users again.

Problem solved? Far from it. I have a workaround, but the problem remains. BigPond, and
BigPond alone, is blocking a reputable domain. They're not reporting the fact. They're not
telling their customers. They're not even telling their “technical support”!

I'm disgusted. And even after nearly 20 years of negative experience with BigPond, I'm
still surprised.

And what can I use instead of tinyurl.com? lemis.com, of course. The URL is
even shorter.

Somehow Powercor is doing funny things
with the line voltage lately. I've noticed from time to time that my office UPS starts
running its fans, and today it happened several times. Checking the display showed strange
results: normally it's in pass-through mode, so input and output voltages are the same,
nominally 230 V. But today I had input voltages of up to 254 V, and the UPS reduced that—to
round 211 V! Why?

And at 16:44, another muffled “beep” from somewhere. I was watching TV at the time, so I
backspaced to be sure it wasn't coming from the TV. No. In the kitchen, the oven clock was
on, the microwave oven clock was
out. RCD trip. And this
time, for the first time, I checked: there's a little window in the device, just to the
right of the switch, which shows whether it tripped because of overcurrent (normal circuit
breaker function, in which case it's grey, as shown here), or residual current (red):

This is getting to the state where I really need to do something. Spent some time putting
together a list of all the problems I've had with the house wiring. It's quite a list. And
fixing this problem will involve a lot of work: there should be two separate circuits in the
shed, one for the UPS and one for everything else. But Jim has only put one cable in there,
and there's not enough space in the conduit for another. So it'll involve digging. The
whole thing could be expensive.

Gardner Mick along today to do some more work, mainly mulching, putting in tree guards and
changing the soil in some garden beds. Now we need to decide what to do with the non-bed
parts of the garden. What passes for grass is really pretty terrible, and it hardly seems
worth the trouble.

Called up Red Energy today to give
them permission to charge me less. Spoke to Amanda (I think), and while I was there
discussed the interesting fact that I don't seem to have an off-peak rate, only two
different Peak rates (steps 1 and 2, $0.236 and $0.231
per kWh respectively). These prove
to be dependent on consumption, not time. Why no off-peak? Amanada checked and came up
with an on-peak rate of $0.33 odd and $0.12, the latter only from 22:00 to 7:00. Exact
details to be sent per email. They didn't arrive.

Is that worth it? Probably not. I don't think we use much power in the night, so it would
probably end up costing more. I'll wait until we can use solar energy for our electricity.

ALDI had a “vertical grill” on offer on
Wednesday, and it looked interesting enough to try out. It's effectively a
mini Döner grill, though it comes with
attachments to secure up to 7 (why 7?) skewers at once:

Running the grill was not as simple as I thought. The points of the skewers are inserted in
a plate at the bottom of the rotisserie, and the other ends (with a bow) are inserted at the
top. But that isn't as simple as it looks. The first attempt failed after a couple of
rotations:

Possibly the bow is intended to fit in double. But lifting the upper plate does it too.

I had expected the one-sided heating to be a problem, but it doesn't seem to be. The
instructions specify 20 to 30 minutes for this kind of skewer. The first couple of minutes
don't count: you have to insert the skewers into the grill while it's cold, and it takes
that long to warm up. And after a little over 20 minutes, the skewers were well done, and
mine were tender. For some reason, Yvonne got all the tough
pieces. But all in all it seems a reasonable acquisition.

Last week, in preparation for my colonoscopy, we bought some beef to make beef broth: chuck steak (I think) and a
marrow bone. The broth was good, but what do we do with the rest? What the Germans used to
call „Rinderbraten“, literally roast
beef, but in fact far inferior. I suspect that modern German usage is more in line with a
real roast beef. The Wikipedia page seems to be total nonsense.

I had first experienced this kind of dish round 1973. I don't know why they called it
roast; what we had was boiled, and it was just the same as in those days. And you can't cut
it into thin slices, because it's close to disintegrating. So the slices are between 6 and
10 mm in thickness.

Yvonne asked me to cut it, and she would arrange delicately
it on the plate:

Off to Geelong with Kath Philips for the
Delta society training. It took most of
the day! I don't suppose I learnt that much, but it was certainly worth going through.
Probably one of the most interesting discoveries was that Vanda Iwanowski seems to run one
of the largest groups single-handedly.

Kath is the area coordinator (I think that's the term they agreed on)
for Ballarat, which seems to include
places as far afield
as Seymour. She has planned
for us to visit a couple of aged care facilities in East Ballarat, though I didn't get the
names. That way we could drive together, which makes sense. We'll probably do a
preliminary visit on Thursday.

Vanda did her presentations using a laptop, with corresponding sound quality. She expressed
an intention to buy external speakers. As it happened, we were just round the corner from
MSY, a cheap computer components supplier I
used to use until they completely blocked a valid return, though availability of advertised
components was also an issue.

Round to take a look during the tea break. Shut. OK, that's not that unusual on a
Sunday. But they're shut all day Saturday too! They're only open from 10:30 to 17:30 on
weekdays. I suppose other people have also decided that they're not worth the trouble.

Vanda talked about communication during one of her presentations, noting particularly the
Facebook
page. But then she said that she didn't respond to PMs (whatever that may be), and
that to communicate with her we should send email. No arguments from me, modulo the fact
that she uses Microsoft “Outlook”, which confuses the hell out of users when it sees a digital
signature. But Vanda has found out about that, and will no longer be confused.

What surprised me, though, was that the other participants all said they didn't like
Facebook either! More an unpleasant utility than something they enjoyed.

Our daughter Yana has been living
in Melbourne for the last few years,
but now she has decided to move back
to Adelaide. She doesn't have much in
the way of belongings, but more than will fit in her car, and since she's going back without
anywhere to live, she's asked us to look after some of them for her. Personally I think
it's just a conspiracy with Yvonne to make me finally tidy up
the shed so that we have somewhere to put the stuff.

Borrowed one of CJ's many trailers—he had left another one in front of the shed:

I had the kangaroo, and it was surprisingly tender. I'll have to find out what part of the
animal it was.

Back to Yana's place (just round the corner) and discovered that there was much more than
she had mentioned. Fortunately we managed to pack everything into the back of the car or on
the trailer. Here photos taken when we stopped to check everything was still fastened
properly:

Back home with no issues, and by chance CJ came by as we were about to unload, so I let him
help too. We put the shelves on top of others that we're keeping for Yana. Now to find
space in the shed for the smaller items.

In general the Great War was a shock
for the country. It would seem that it had more of an effect than
the Second World War. War
memorials were erected all over the country, and in Melbourne they built
a Shrine of Remembrance,
where we used to go on Armistice
Day every year (more precisely, in my case, the two years that I was in school in
Australia in November). One feature of the Shrine is a complicated structure that allows a ray of sunlight to go over the Stone of Remembrance at 11:00 on 11
November.

And then there was Anzac Day. Yes, we
observed that too. But fittingly Armistice Day was the real day for remembrance (in fact,
it's called Remembrance Day in
many countries, including Australia).

But somehow things have changed. Yes, the ray of sunlight still goes through the shrine at
12:00 on 11 November (due to Daylight Savings Time), and it seems there's a mirror to
redirect the ray so that it goes over the stone at 11:00. But the day is no longer even a
public holiday. Like the Texans with
their Alamo, it seems that the Australians
(and New Zealanders) prefer to recall a defeat rather than a victory. Instead of observing
11:00 (a relatively civilized time), people go to church services at dawn, round about 23:00
on 24 April in Gelibolu. And there are
numerous other events. I wonder where these dressed-up people (seen at a freeway rest area
on the way from Melbourne to Ballarat)
are going:

Why? The motto “lest we forget” seems to have been in vain. People have forgotten
Remembrance Day! Still, it's a completely unfounded rumour that they'll change the ray in
the Shrine of Remembrance to have a ray of sunshine go over the stone at dawn on 25 April.

When we got back home, the front door was wide open! I had gone to some trouble (and it's
really trouble) to ensure it was locked before we left. It has one of the strangest locks I
have ever seen (thanks, JG King). As
far as I can tell, it's not possible to lock it from outside, only to unlock it. There's a
lever on the inside which seems to be the only way to lock it. Here first the unlocked
position, then the locked:

I suppose it's in keeping that there's a little window under the lever which changes colour
when it's locked. You need to be a midget to see it.

On the other hand, there are multiple ways to unlock it: the key (it would be nice to say
“of course”, but then I can't use the key to lock it), tilting the lever back again, or
simply using the handle from the inside. Could it be that a cat jumped up and pulled it
down? I haven't seen our current cats do that, but I've seen plenty of others that did.

What a piece of junk!

And then, while putting Yana's furniture in the shed, I had to
move the UPS. And in the process, despite all caution, I managed to disconnect the output cable!

I didn't discover that until I got into the house, of course. For once it wasn't the RCD
that tripped things. Reconnect the cable and... the RCD tripped!

With our new focus on varied breakfasts, it occurred to me that Huevos a la flamenca would be a good
addition. So out looking for a recipe.

Where do you find good recipes on the Web? It's not easy, but in general it makes a good
idea to look for recipes in the language of the origin of the dish, in this case Spanish. I
can read enough Spanish for that not to be too difficult, and I came up with this recipe. About the only
word I didn't know was guisantes, which proves to mean peas. And the recipe doesn't look
bad.

But the quantities! For two people, they want:

quantity

ingredient

step

500 g

tomatoes

250 g

onions

80 g

peas

500 g

potatoes

60 g

serrano ham

50 g

chorizo

That's a total of 820 g per person! And the eggs? Oh yes, one egg per person too.

I think I'll try different quantities. There's also a question as to whether the potatoes
are appropriate. Even the comments suggest that they're not.

Our lounge room armchairs and sofa are now round 15 years old, and it's time to think about
replacements. Today Yvonne found some used armchairs
in Enfield, so somewhat against
my better judgement went off with her to take a look.

We've been to the place before, at the end of Melaleuca Road. We've been there before at a garage sale
(where we bought wicker furniture and, it seems,
a mezzaluna), but now they're moving
out.

They wanted $500 for the suite, which they say was brand new; it certainly wasn't far from
it. But the leg parts of the recliners were too short, and the cushions somewhat firm, so
we declined.

I really need to get MythTV working
on tiwi, but it's like pulling teeth. It's a good thing I keep notes.

First step was to connect the USB tuner to the antenna, which was about 2 m away from the
computer. OK, I must have a USB extension cable somewhere. And I did, but the one I found
was 5 m long, on the borderline of the acceptable. Found two more 4.5 m long, so tried one
of them:

But it wasn't running. I have seen this
before too. It writes an error message and dies with completion status 0. But where
does the error message go? More looking with ktrace. Trimming irrelevant calls, I
found:

I've been ranting about the poor quality of multimedia software for over 10 years now, and I
had thought that nothing would surprise me. But writing error messages to
the bit bucket? Went looking for the
code, and found it in webcamd.c at line 825:

To Hans Petter's credit, it's not his fault. It's this
appalling Video4Linux. At the very
least, it exits with status 0 after an error, which is a no-no. But there's nothing in
the webcamd code that opens /dev/null, so I'm guessing that it does that too.
Just don't upset the user with error messages!

So I got webcamd running, and finally got round to configuring it at startup. Next
was mythtv-setup. It stopped without an error message. The only hint was what was
on the xterm:

That didn't stop it; it carried on for a while and stopped for no stated reason, though it's
clear that something was wrong. But as I said 9 July 2006, it's a
good thing the thing was started from a shell and not from a display manager, otherwise I
wouldn't have had any information at all. Clearly something was wrong with the
installation, so I took the coward's way out and reinstalled the port, in the process
getting this message, which is worth saving:

Finally mythtv-setup ran. Ten years ago I
complained how slow it was on the hardware of the day, but since then hardware has got
better, and it was no longer such an issue. But now they've adapted, and it's glacially
slow again! Got this far:

Upgrade database to the latest version. It's not clear why this is necessary, but it
works.

Set locale for PAL, PAL teletext, and
Australia. It's not clear why there should be a choice of PAL
or NTSC; both are obsolete.

Defer shutdown options until later. In the 10 years I've been running Myth, I never got
them to work.

Capture cards: it took forever, but it recognized the card.

Recording profiles, video sources: Not sure what these are. They weren't there in
previous versions, so I didn't do anything.

Connect source to input: it has a scan button, but I couldn't select it.

Those two messages are 14 seconds apart. Further investigation showed that they occurred
when probing the card. Presumably mythtv-setup was too polite to complain. But what
does the message mean? More ktrace:

Needs webcamd >= 3.10.0.7; seems to be only a bit less sensitive than my dib0700 tuners
(worse reception in low-signal areas); remotes not supported yet by the Linux rtl28xxu
driver and thus by webcamd; also supported by the comms/dabstick-radio and comms/rtl-sdr
ports

Contact: nox

Where's nox when you need him? Sadly, beyond caring. But what's this mention
of a rtl28xxu driver? Went looking, but couldn't find anything of use.

OK, time for a message to the FreeBSD multimedia list.
Got a reply from Hans Petter, the author of webcamd, but he didn't address many of my
questions. He did suggest using w_scan, though. Mañana.

So I've agreed with Kath Philips to meet at the Geoffrey
Cutter Centre tomorrow at 13:00. Where's that? The Web tells me Kenny Street,
Windsor Gardens, East Ballarat. But when I put that into Google
Maps, it takes me to the Eureka Village
Hostel in Balmoral Drive. Why? By not quite complete coincidence, that was the last
place I looked at before I searched for the Geoffrey Cutter Centre, and it looked for all
the world like it hadn't accepted the new input.

With the aid of people on IRC, investigated the issue. It seems that Google Maps doesn't
know about Windsor Gardens. If I look just for “Windsor Gardens, East Ballarat”, it takes
me to Windsor Avenue in Alfredton, to the west of
the city. Other strange results are a search for Victoria St, East Ballarat (the main
street), which it can't find. It offers Victoria St, Ballarat East and Victoria
St, Sebastopol and others
even further afield:

<Mavvie> " victoria Street windsor gardens east Ballarat " gives a nice one too.
<Mavvie> "royal ct, Windsor Gardens, East Ballarat" shows the hotel on the other
side of victoria street.
<Mavvie> wtf.

But Google isn't alone. Whereis gives 5 hits in all of Australia, none of them anywhere
near Ballarat.

The real issue seems to be “Windsor Gardens”. Leave that out and they all find it: Kenny
Street intersects Balmoral Drive, and in fact it's not far from where Google Maps wanted to
take me. Whereis wants to take me
via Buninyong, which it claims is
faster despite being 5.1 km longer. How much faster? Hard to say: for both it claims 33
minutes. Google Maps does this one better, though that's more a coincidence.

Who did that? Typically Sasha and
Rani play around there—the barrier is to
stop Sasha getting at
the Hibiscus. And Rani is
probably not capable of knocking the shelf over, so until proof of the contrary it's Sasha's
fault.

More skewers (lamb kidney) this evening, on our
new Döner grill. I confirmed that, despite
the instructions, the top plate seems to be designed for clipping the bow of the skewer.
Next time I'll take photos.

The other thing that's clear is that the bottom plate should be higher than suggested, so
that it's at the bottom of the heating element. With soft things like kidneys, the content
of the skewer slides to the bottom, and it's easy to put it a few centimetres lower, where
the bottom of the skewer doesn't get as much heat.

Off with Yvonne, Nikolai and Leonid to Ballarat this morning to visit a
couple of nursing homes as Delta society representatives. This was our first time, and Kath Philips came along. Yvonne will be visiting the Geoffrey
Cutter Centre, ostensibly in Kenny Street, every Friday. I'll be visiting the
Eureka Village Hostel, ostensibly in Balmoral Drive, every other Friday at the same
time. In fact, the two facilities are right next to each other.

We both went through both facilities so that we can step in for each other if necessary.
This is not the first time I've been in a facility like this, but a number of the people look significantly worse than
I recalled from the James Thomas Court Hostel. Many of them seemed particularly feeble, and one
bedridden person reminded me
of Munch's The
Scream. I suppose I'll get used to it—possibly I'll end up like that myself—but it's
saddening to see how people age.

Yesterday I complained about
the inaccuracies of Google Maps when searching
for the nursing homes. Today I used my GPS navigator. It found the address without
difficulties, and it didn't do silly things like going
via Buninyong. But the route details!
It took us on a zig-zag path round East Ballarat, and a few hundred metres before arrival
wanted us to turn left into private property. OK, we were only a few hundred metres from
Victoria Street, so continued there. It decided to take us down the frontage road—the wrong
direction down a one-way street. Ignored that too and turned right onto Victoria Street, so
that Kenny St was on the right. The navigator told us where to turn right—across the
central divide!

I wonder when navigational aids will come of age. Interestingly, the issues seem always to
have been with the maps and not the devices themselves.

Yesterday Hans Petter
suggested using w_scan to check the functionality of the tuner. I've tried it before, with no useful results. But it seems that it really is better
now: the (now obligatory) -c option specifies the country. It went off and spent
10 minutes producing copious output:

What are these “already known transponders”? Clearly the numbers at the beginning of the
lines are frequencies in kHz, but
comparing with cvr2 there is nothing at 613.5 MHz. And the first two entries are the
same channel, offset by 125 kHz. It's a pity that it doesn't report signal strength at each
frequency.

After that it went off and identified the streams:

tune to: QAM_AUTO f = 571500 kHz I999B7C999D999T999G999Y999
(time: 08:18) WARNING: char_coding 210: iconv_open failed.
The conversion from 'ISO_6937-2' to 'UTF-8' is not supported.
WARNING: char_coding 210: iconv_open failed.
The conversion from 'ISO_6937-2' to 'UTF-8' is not supported.
service = SBS ONE (SBS)
WARNING: char_coding 210: iconv_open failed.
The conversion from 'ISO_6937-2' to 'UTF-8' is not supported.
WARNING: char_coding 210: iconv_open failed.
The conversion from 'ISO_6937-2' to 'UTF-8' is not supported.
service = SBS HD (SBS)

What's this ISO 6937-2? It seems to be
a strange alternative to ISO 8859,
committed by the CCITT decades ago. Why
can't iconv convert it? And how much mutilation does it produce if not converted?

So: webcamd and the tuner work. The problem is clearly with MythTV. But where? Hens Petter answered a question about
the rtl28xxu driver rather surprisingly:

>>> I don't see any mention of rtl28xxu in current documentation, and
>>> no way to specify a driver in the man page. Can I assume that this
>>> is an undocumented change?

Hi,

rtl28xxu works. I have one myself, tested with VDR.

Maybe you need to disable the DISEQ feature.

OK, what's DISEQ? Looking through the mythtv-setup pages, I see a tick box
“wait for SEQ start header”, but unticking it made no difference. Presumably
it's DiSEqC. But that's for positioning
satellite dishes. On the other hand, the original message suggests that that's what it's
looking for:

There's at least one error
report on the topic, but it's years old, and it has been closed without resolution:

The DiSEqCDevTree is only needed for DVB-S setups. It looks like you made some mistake in
setting up the card or there is a problem with permissions for your recording device
files. Please ask for help on the users mailing list and include as much information as
you can such as the type of card you are using, the Linux distribution you are using and
which guide you used for setting things up.

No time to look any further. Maybe I should follow Hans Petter's lead and try VDR.

Still, before I used MythTV I used tzap to record programmes. It
might be worth trying that too. But where has it gone? After some searching found that it
has morphed into dvbv5-zap, now part of v4l-utils. Installed, but
didn't get around to playing with it.

Chicken à la Kiev is a popular dish,
and we can get the cutlets pre-made at the butcher. So yesterday Yvonne picked up a couple.

But how do you prepare them? I've found numerous and conflicting recipes, such as
this one, which wants to deep fry them for 8½ minutes. Others only want 5 minutes.
But what is right for what Yvonne brought home? Chicken? Look at the weight:

When I was a lad, an entire chicken weighed 1.2 or 1.3 kg (and was invariably frozen). In
his book “La
cuisine du marché”, Paul Bocuse
states the weight of a turkey as 2 to 2.5 kg. So clearly the sizes relate to turkey, not
chicken. And how long should I deep fry it? Until meltdown or explosion? Clearly a better
name for this dish would be
Turkey Chornobil.

Things didn't work out that badly. Here they are at 3, 5 and 7 minutes, after which I
served them:

Yvonne bought some
frozen kippers on Wednesday—two of them,
conveniently frozen together back to back so they both had to be completely thawed before
separation. How do you cook them? I haven't done that in 45 years, and in those days I
would probably have fried them. But I recalled that they should be grilled.

What did the packaging say? Defrost for two minutes, then microwave at full power for 6
minutes. I suspect their microwave oven is less powerful than mine. But I also had the
option of defrosting and grilling, both without time specification or any way to recognize
when they're done.

Finally thawed at 300 W (“defrost”) for what proved to be 3 minutes, after which I could
separate them, though they were still a little frozen. Grilled in the middle of the toy
oven for 8 minutes. The result was OK:

More investigation of the DiSEqC
on tiwi today. There's really nothing to explain why MythTV should want to apply a satellite protocol to
a DVB-T tuner. Looking in the database
brought some enlightenment: the capturecard table includes a
field dvb_diseqc. And in my database, there were two entries for the single
capture card. The difference? Only the dvb_diseqc field. In one record it was
set to NULL, in the other to 0.

OK, I can play around with that. Remove one entry? Set dvb_diseqc to
consistently NULL or 0? Nothing helped. Could it be that one of my
antenna amplifiers is sending spurious information via the tuner? Plugged in the toy
antenna that came with the tuner, removed the old definitions, added the tuner again. Once
again I got two entries varying only in the dvb_diseqc field. And once again, of
course, the missing device tree.

Hans Petter suggested UTSL. He could be
right, but last time it turned my
stomach. Can it have got better? The amazing code that I discovered nearly 12 years ago is
still there (in mythtv/libs/libmythtv/recorders/RTjpegN.cpp), just slightly modified
to pass the compiler:

DVB card display? Sometimes I think I'm living in a parallel universe. I've been fighting
multimedia software for well over 10 years now, and while I'm coming to accept the
strangenesses, I'm really puzzled about what kind of confusion goes on in the developers'
heads.

Still, one of the reasons I want MythTV is because of the MythWeb interface,
and nothing else seems to have anything comparable. So it looks like setting a debugger
loose on mythtv-setup.

Finally got round to planting
the Buddlejas to the south of the house
today. Yvonne had planted five of them in one pot, and of
course the roots were all intertwined, so I wanted to extricate them myself. I ended up
with a lot of extraneous root material, but the five twigs look like they may survive.

Later Yvonne wanted to go to the plant nursery
in Corindhap where we bought some
plants at the beginning of the
month. This time I took a notepad with me. The proprietor is called Russell, phone
number is 5346 1033, and the reason he has so many plants
from New Zealand is because he's a
New Zealander (Yvonne: “That'll be
seven Hebes”. Russell “No, sx”).

The mumble from the beginning of the month proves to be
a Metrosideros excelsa
“variegata”, also called pōhutukawa, and yes, it's a tree. How high do they get? Depending
on whom you ask, between 1.5 m and 25 m. All are agreed that the flowers are pretty and
red, and they remind me of some Australian natives, such
as Hakea:

In fact, by complete coincidence (Yvonne asked me what the German word
for Melaleuca is; the common name
proves to be Myrtenheide), I
discovered that they're relatively closely related to Melaleuca, which in turn is
genetically difficult to distinguish
from Callistemon.

I couldn't stop Yvonne from buying a total of 41 plants, the ones in the front row here:

On the left and in the middle are a total of 25 “Wooly bushes”, which prove
to Adenanthos sericeus.
They'll get planted around the riding arena. On the right are variegated Hebes, hardly
different in appearance from the Metrosideros. Between the Adenanthos are a couple of
ground cover Grevilleas. and
7 Westringias, which Russell called
Smoky or similar. On the web I discover spellings “Smokey” and “Smokie” as well. Probably
the best description is this one, which states that they're a cultivar
of Westringia fruticosa, and
they grow to 5' × 5' (1.5 × 1.5 m). Elsewhere I discover they'll barely make it to 50 cm.

After moving to Stones Road, my TV recoding errors diminished dramatically, to almost 0.
But it didn't last, and I've had periods where things have been very bad. In the past two
months more than 50% of all recordings had significant problems. Why? Problems with the
antenna system?

And suddenly they're gone. For over a week, I have had no recording errors at all. That
can't be a transmitter problem, can it? Each channel has its own transmitters.
Interference from close by? The line of sight from the transmitters goes at an angle of
about 310° over Progress Road. But what could there be there to disturb RF signal
propagation?

Rani is growing quickly, and is now able
to jump up onto the work surfaces in the kitchen. How do we teach her to stop? The
traditional method is a water pistol, but we didn't have one. So I poured a small glass of
water over her.

It didn't seem to make any difference. Presumably she has that from
her Prionailurus
bengalensis ancestors, who are semi-aquatic.